"A remarkable volume. With rare clarity, Tinderbox lays bare the origins of the AIDS virus, and then reveals the often hapless and delinquent responses of the international community. It's a fascinating read: relentlessly honest, sometimes scathing, alway principled."

—Stephen Lewis, Founder/Director of AIDS-Free World, Former UN Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa

“Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On was the first—and for decades the best—book on AIDS. Tinderbox is every bit as good, revealing the same denial, the same story of politics trumping science, and the same tragedy. Read it!"

"An excellent read. Tinderbox brilliantly outlines the successes, failures, and missed opportunities in the battle of HIV prevention over the last thirty years."

—Elly Katabira, M.D., President, International AIDS Society

“Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin have written a searing book about the AIDS epidemic. Tinderbox is an indictment of Western ineptitude and meddling and lost opportunities to prevent millions of infections and deaths."

—Stephanie Nolen, author of 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa

“Timberg and Halperin have been challenging conventional wisdom for years. Their book is entertaining, thought-provoking, human, and in the end, hopeful for a continent that craves some answers after two decades of HIV prevention failures.”

“The sometimes glorious, often tragic constellation of science, politics, and personalities in the fight against AIDS comes to life in the masterful storytelling of an energetic journalist and a passionate scientist.”

—Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver

Longtime Washington Post journalist Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly epidemic and the best ways to fight it today.

Recent genetic discoveries have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried a nearly identical virus for millennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. During the Scramble for Africa near the turn of the twentieth century, colonial companies blazed new routes through the jungle in search of rubber and other riches, sending African porters into remote regions rarely traveled before. It was here, during the age of european conquest, that humans first contracted the strain of HIV that would eventually cause 99 percent of AIDS deaths around the world.

Western powers were key actors in turning a localized outbreak into a sprawling epidemic as bustling new trade routes, modern colonial cities, and the rise of prostitution sped the virus across Africa. Christian missionaries campaigned to suppress polygamy, but left in its place fractured sexual cultures that proved uncommonly vulnerable to HIV. Equally devastating was the gradual loss of the African ritual of male circumcision, which recent studies have shown offers significant protection against infection.

Timberg and Halperin argue that the same Western hubris that marked the colonial era has hamstrung the effort to fight HIV. From the United Nations AIDS program to the Bush administration's historic relief campaign, global health officials have favored well-meaning Western approaches--condom promotion, abstinence campaigns, HIV testing, abstinence campaigns--that have proven ineffective in slowing the epidemic in Africa. Meanwhile they have overlooked homegrown African initiatives aimed squarely at the behaviors spreading the virus.

In a riveting narrative that stretches from colonial Leopoldville to 1980s San Francisco to South Africa today, Tinderbox reveals how human hands unleashed this epidemic and can now overcome it, if only we learn the lessons of the past.

"...laced with science - virology, epidemiology, the mechanics of circumcision - but the writing remains crisp and clear. The story is full of real, live people that help the reader understand African cultures, colonialism and the devastating effects of disease."

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About the Authors

is the former Johannesburg bureau chief for The Washington Post. from his position, he visited twenty-three African nations and penned dozens of major stories about AIDS. He is now The Washington Post’s deputy national security editor.

is an epidemiologist and medical anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a top technical adviser in the U.S. government’s PEPFAR program to combat AIDS.